Document assembly has been accomplished in many ways. The most elementary assembly operation is with a typewriter and wherein pages are keyed and printed sequentially. With the advent of correcting typewriters, minor errors were easily corrected. When magnetic tape/card typewriters were introduced, minor errors were readily corrected, and major changes or document reassembly in terms of changing the order of paragraphs, moving paragraphs, etc., were made much easier for an operator to handle. In addition, portions of different documents could be merged to form a new document.
Popular in the marketplace today are keyboard/display word processing systems, and keyboard/display standalone, and host connected, computer workstations. With either of these systems, merge operations for document assembly are readily managed. However, merging is a batch operation in that an operator or user must enter one document and mark the location of insertion, and then enter the other document and mark the portion to be moved or copied.
The introduction of windowing systems simplified merge to a degree in that several documents in separate windows could be simultaneously viewed. The user could then cut and paste data from one document window into another document window to accomplish document assembly. The problem with cut and paste is that the data in the assembled document is "dead" data. That is, the data is printed or displayed when the document is printed or displayed, but the user cannot edit the data and have the changes reflected back in the source document. If the editor does not understand the format of the merged data, the user must return to the source document, reedit the data, cut the data from the source document and paste the data back into the assembled document.
Based on the above, merge in a batch, or cut and paste, environment is an old concept. Also, referencing of data, such as with the include operation in the IBM Displaywriter System, is old. The above art is pertinent to varying degrees, but falls short of either anticipating the instant invention or rendering the instant invention obvious. The instant invention presents an advance over the prior art in that both dynamic, on line merging of fully editable data from one document into another, and two way linkage of the data between the documents is available to an operator through interactive referencing of data. In addition references are interactively resolved and the contents of the referenced data are shown on line in the assembled document. The advantages of the above advances are improved operator flexibility, preservation of data integrity, and system useability.